Nature-Deficit Disorder: Nature Helps Kids Keep Their Eyes On The Ball

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Nature-Deficit Disorder: Nature Helps Kids Keep Their Eyes On The Ball

 

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/10120/

 

By Todd Wilkinson, 7-24-06

 

When was the last time you heard local law enforcement officials blame violent behavior and drug use in our kids on teenagers spending too many hours outdoors, recreating, in nature?

 

When have you ever been warned by pediatricians that kids who like to hike with their parents have higher rates of obesity and juvenile diabetes than their slacker, video game playing, cola-drinking counterparts?

 

In the daily newspaper, I read an observation from a county sheriff who expressed his opinion that many recent young offenders committing criminal acts had a passion for playing video games in which simulated murder and virtual bloodletting were the skill sets needed to win.

 

Mow down the competition using an Uzi or AK; watch the targets hit the ground on their backs with a thud and marvel at the flash of red for added special effects. Steel the eyes, pull the trigger without reflection, enter the tunnel of catatonia.

 

Now swagger forth though the hallways of your school afterward, reminding your best buds how cool it was to splatter those dudes.

 

Gosh, it seems "so real."

 

Should any of us be surprised by what the sheriff said?

 

Are we parents paying attention?

 

Apparently not.

 

Even in the relatively rural wild West, in communities where opportunities for enjoying nature abound, many of our kids are chronically detached from an environment that sharpens their senses rather than deadens it.

 

The problem of nature-deficit disorder, the subject of Richard Louvs book, Last Child in the Woods, struck home a couple of summers ago when I helped organize a camping trip for pre-teen players on the hockey team I coach. The mom and dad of one of the boys graciously invited us out to their ranch on the edge of a mountain range for a retreat.

 

My goal was to try and build team camaraderie by removing the boys from an environment that was routinely familiar to them. I had no idea how radical it would be.

 

We spent a couple of days there hiking, swimming, shooting hockey pucks against a makeshift net along the side of a barn, catching snakes, watching badgers, feeding the horses, being out exposed to the ambient elements and natural sounds instead of having the lads plopped on a couch, in a darkened room, killing simulated cops and make-believe brown-skinned terrorist foes in which the object of their role playing and hand-eye coordination, it would seem, is to be a gang banger.

 

Let it be known that during my days as a violent crime journalist in Chicago, I interacted with lots of detectives who were called to the aftermath of real-life gangsta gunplay. I challenge anyone to argue that those grim scenes had any redeeming virtue in them. At the Cook County Morgue, I can tell you there was no adrenalin-driven euphoria or high fives. The smell of formaldehyde, the wails of moms and dads (some of them single women abandoned by their spouses), and the face of blunt-trauma carnage were the terminus for what the sheriff, above, was talking about.

 

For those who think this is a subtle dig at guns, it isn't. I hunt. I own shotguns stored out of reach under lock and key. I aim to teach my son and daughter, when the times comes, the personal responsibility that accompanies firearms, the consideration one must have with taking an animal's life and eating it, obeying the law, the role we play in making room for wildlife in the natural outdoor world, and the joy that comes with simply being outdoors in the autumn.

 

During our hockey team's sojourn to the countryside, it quickly became apparent that some of the kids, despite living in the Gallatin Valley their entire lives, had never been on a hike or hunt to the national forest that begins a few miles from their front door.

 

They had never seen a garter snake in the wild, never held a frog in their hands, never swam in a farm pond, never enjoyed an evening counting stars in the night sky.

 

They had never played in a natural setting long enough not to fear it.

 

These rough and tumble warriors, some of whom, like a significant number of their peers across the nation who suffer from ADD, could recite by rote the entire menu at McDonalds or the sexually explicit, gender demeaning lyrics to a hip-hop song, or tell you, with giddiness in their voices, how many virtual people they had dispatched in their X-Box games (or other players they injured playing virtual NHL with their thumbs), but they had trepidation putting a worm on a fish hook.

 

I was floored.

 

Some were surprisingly out of shape and markedly overweight, dubious of any reward that could come from trekking a couple of miles to the top of a bluff for views of an uncluttered, breathtaking panorama. I was dumbstruck when one boy declared, as we crested the hill and witnessed the sunset: This is boring. When can we get back to the tent so I can play my Game Boy.

 

His thoughts were lost to a different horizon.

 

Was I missing something?

 

Is it right for me to judge? Perhaps not.

 

I apologize to any guilty parents Im offending who believe that raising latchkey kids and surrendering their mentorship duties to a joystick is their God-given right. If espousing fitness and expecting parents to get theirs kids outdoors more is elitist, then explain how the budget allows for Nintendo GameCubes, big-screened TVs, premium cable and a diet of fast food?

 

Here's a revelation Westerners may also find of interest which Louv offered in an interview with Sarah Karnasiewicz of Salon.com. She asked if nature-deficit is most acute in cities. "A major study came out a few months ago that said that the rate of obesity in children is growing faster in rural areas than it is in cities and suburbs," Louv said. "Again, it seems counterintuitive. But its not so counterintuitive when you think about the fact that the family farm is fairly nonexistent now. Kids in rural areas are playing the same video games, watching the same television, and theyre on longer car rides."

 

I acknowledge humbly: It is a constant battle in our family to remain vigilant. It requires persistence. It means making your kids unhappy. We've come close to getting rid of the television completely only to retreat out of lack of will power. We succumb to hypocrisy. My wife and I are not perfect parents.

 

But our kids are well aware that the universe does revolve around them. They know that we control the kinds of foods that are in the pantry. They know that skipping schoolwork means losing their sports and other coveted privileges. They know the value of exercise. And, whenever possible, we try consciously to have them take notice of things happening in the outdoor green spaces, wherever we find them, and to dwell in those moments.

 

Studies show and Louvs book makes clear the pandemic of future health care costs, learning problems and an inability to relate to one another on human terms that were foisting on young people. Those costs will come due on society itself. Simple actions taken to prevent the onset of juvenile diabetes now prevents exponential financial burdens later, not to mention thwarting lifestyle misery for the people we love.

 

But more than that, we're compromising our kids ability to foster connections to the world around them and stifling their emotional development. Rather than showing them how to find solace or beauty in the countryside, we've taught them to bond with a hand-held toy that gives them instant gratification and reinforces a "me-first before anyone else" sense of self.

 

Another insight that has revealed itself the longer I've been in the youth coaching ranks: The parents who are the most indulgent with their kids, who refuse to draw lines in the sand with their offspring's personal behavior; who de-emphasize schoolwork, who shrug off good nutrition and fitness, and who aspire to be their kids' best friends rather than role models; these are the parents who also tend to be "the screamers" along the sidelines who put themselves before the team and who are the bane of coaches, fans and wring the lifeblood out of amateur athletics.

 

A coincidence?

 

Where did we go wrong?

 

The catalysts, experts say, are many beyond the lack of attentive, conscientious parenting. Louv says were filling our kids lives up, in some cases, not only with over-choreographed activities and electronic gadgetry that undermine their ability to think for themselves, but weve made them fearful of going outside based upon an exaggerated sense of danger.

 

How many times have you heard this: "Don't ride your bike to the park, Johnny and Sally."

 

"Why not, mom?"

 

"Because you might get abducted by all the kooks who are out there."

 

Louv takes a shot at lawyers and overbearing parents who together have forced governments and communities to design parks that don't hold the same powerful allure to kids that they used to. God knows we certainly don't want parks landscaped with schrubs and bushes that gangs of kooks can lurk behind. And don't put a park near a body of water because, gosh sakes, the kids might drown when they're enjoying themselves fishing and swimming.

 

"What we usually design is really more 'lawyer-friendly' [parks] than 'child-friendly'," Louv says, noting that he supports tort reform. "This is a litigious society, and a lot of the places you are talking about have been designed by attorneys, not park designers. But there is interplay between the fear of lawsuits and [parents] fear of a 'bogeyman' that is going to hurt their children indeed, they almost have become one and the same."

 

The National Recreation and Park Association reports that 75 percent of Americans live within a two-mile walking distance of a public park. Public health officials will tell you there's far greater danger posed to your kid's safety and health from physical inactivity and all the grams of processed sugar they're ingesting than from child predatorsthough it doesn't mean parents shouldn't pay attention or not encourage their kids to play in groups.

 

During the 1990s, Louv observes, the radius around the home where children were allowed to roam, due to parental paranoia, had shrunk to one-ninth of what it had been two decades earlier.

 

Weve also all heard of the rising asthma problem in kids. Our own son was diagnosed with childhood asthma but it has become ameliorated by spending more time outdoors being active and fit.

 

As Louv notes, kids today spend 90 percent of their time indoors where air quality is generally between two and ten times WORSE than it is outside. The irony is that parents may be stricter about not allowing their children to recreate in nature but on the other hand they can be completely permissive when it comes to video games.

 

How did we, proud and righteous Baby Boomer and Generation X parents who vowed to never give our kids the same detached parenting given to us, go from actually nostalgically recounting our carefree childhoods during the Wonder Years to becoming so up tight about our kids need to be overachievers and sports stars?

 

When did we become so manically neurotic in programming their waking hours, so hands on in micromanaging their play dates and yet so hands off and oblivious about other things happening before our eyes?

 

A hopeful sign for me was that being outdoors for only a couple of days seemed to influence the souls of our young hockey players. Nature, in hindsight, was an adventure. Later that year, my assistant coach and I called a time out during the middle of a hockey game that started on the outdoor rink before sunrise. We told our kids to look to the east as the gloaming day dawned over the Bridger Mountains. In 40 years of playing the sport, I had never, in my life, witnessed something so beautiful during a hockey game as when the red light beams of morning bathed the kids on the ice.

 

We can only try to believe some of it soaked into the kids and their parents. The reality is that many of the boys and girls have gone back to their old routines. They may grow up not having the tools to teach their own kids how to go outside in a sentient wayand I don't mean skating into the brisk north wind on an outdoor hockey rink.

 

Their lack of connection to nature means that they could just as well be living in an urban jungle instead of the northern Rockies with a mountain view.

 

As Louv notes in Last Child In the Woods, restoring our kids' relationship to the wild West may not be a balm for all of societys ills but its not a bad place to start. Teaching them to keep their eye on the ball or the puck doesn't mean just the objects at the tip of their fingers; it's reminding them to lift their heads up and see a bigger horizon.